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Harvard’s Institute for Quantitative Social Science has developed a research tool that facilitates grouping and organizing large sets of digital documents, helping the user make sense of them through an interactive process. Making Sense of Thousands of Messages included development work on the tool and evaluated whether it could be used for library projects that involve large amounts of unstructured text. The tool, named Consilience, provides an interactive user interface to help users discover different ways of grouping sets of documents, to zoom into each cluster within a selected group, and to zoom in further into individual documents. In particular, the project used a set of email messages from the Harvard Library email archiving project to test how Consilience can provide useful clustering and categories to curate and catalog a set of text documents. Initial testing with archivists suggested that the tool has good potential to assist with processing large text collections.

Project Team:

Mercè Crosas Director of Product Development Institute for Quantitative Social Science